In many software applications large amounts of stored data is available for being read, viewed, edited or deleted or for being used in any other way. The more data available in an application, the more important it is to provide an efficient and user friendly user interface for allowing a user to search for specific data. When a user wants to find information available through the internet, the amount of available data to search through is enormous. Software developing companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft provide a lot of different websites and Internet browser applications for enabling searching through the information available on the Internet.
In many online and offline search applications, a search input field is provided for enabling a user to enter a search string. The user uses, e.g., a keyboard for entering one or more relevant words to search for and instructs the search application to look for data matching the entered search string. If the data collection in which to look for matching data is very large, the searching may take a lot of time and the amount of search results provided may be so large that it is very difficult for the user to find the results searched for.
Because the above mentioned problems, the size of the data collection to search in is often limited by allowing the user to select a search domain in addition to the search string. On the Google website, e.g., it is possible to search for text, images, videos, ‘stuff to buy’ or geographical data available in Google maps. When selecting one of these search domains (by clicking on a hyperlink), the Internet browser application loads a search domain specific website with a search input field. In that search input field, the user enters a search string. By pressing a ‘search’ button or hitting the ‘return’ key on the keyboard, a search for the search string in the specific search domain is started. One disadvantage of the Google website is that when a user selects a new search domain, a corresponding web page is loaded and displayed. Loading a new web page costs processing power, network bandwidth and, more important, time.
A further software product provided by Google is the Google Toolbar, which does not need to load a new web page when the user selects a new search domain. The Google Toolbar is available for different Internet browser applications and comprises a search input field accompanied by separate search buttons for different search domains, a search input field accompanied by a separate drop down list representing the search buttons for the different domains or a drop down list with separate search input fields for different search domains. A difference between the toolbar and the website based search entry field is that it does not require loading and displaying of complete web pages just to select a different domain. However searching within the desired search domain still involves multiple user interactions like navigating a (mouse) pointer, clicking on specific input fields, links or buttons, typing a search string.